Growing up is a difficult process for many teens across the U.S., as developing a positive self-image can be a daunting task in the face of society's ever-changing landscape. Teens feel pressure from different areas of their lives: from one's parents, friends, school, job, and even from interactions on social media. It is no wonder, then, that a lot of teens suffer from mental health issues like depression and anxiety. But when teenagers are struggling with a mental health problem and have no healthy outlet to deal with painful or difficult emotions, they can instead end up turning to alcohol or drug use as a form of self-medication. It is a scenario many are familiar with in adults, but with teenagers the risks are much higher because their brains are still developing. At this critical point in their development, drug and alcohol use can be far more problematic.

One of the most important parts of the child welfare system is the professionals who work in it, dedicating their lives to ensuring the well-being of the children within their communities. Child welfare investigators are social workers who are responsible for protecting children from situations of abuse, neglect, and other forms of mistreatment, by assessing their social, physical, psychological and emotional well-being. Investigators do this by completing a number of different tasks: they make home visits in order to explore allegations of abuse or neglect; they provide assessments of home conditions to determine whether a parent or guardian is providing adequate care; they evaluate whether a child should be removed from their living situation; and they place removed children in either temporary foster care or permanent adoptive families.

When the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) was passed into law in 1974, a part of the legislation included the creation of State Advisory Groups (SAGs). While the official names for each SAG across the U.S. is determined by the state, they all have the same purpose: to ensure that states are following the JJDPA, acting as a liaison between federal and state governments. SAGs have the authority to help set program goals, to help guide the writing and implementation of new policies, to create a three-year state juvenile justice and delinquency prevention plan, and to administer federal funds received through the JJDPA. This role includes deciding how best to spend each state’s annual federal grants, which have in recent years been on the decline. This reduction in funding has required SAGs to adapt and become more creative with yearly budgeting in order to follow federal regulations, a task that is becoming increasingly difficult for them to manage in order to keep their state in compliance.

The move away from traditional detention settings for juvenile offenders, and instead toward more rehabilitative ones, has been a process long in the making in juvenile justice departments across the United States. Many states have made great strides in relying less on incarceration and more on community-based alternative services for their young offenders. Often, the biggest roadblock that states run into in attempting to make these types of changes to their systems is figuring out exactly how to fund them. This very question is the subject of a recently released report by researchers at the Urban Institute, who suggest that communities simply need to get creative when it comes to funding juvenile justice programs. According to Samantha Harvell, a principal policy associate at the institute, “It’s time to shift the conversation to a solutions-based approach.” 

An estimated 400,000 children are in foster care across the United States at any given time. While foster care is a necessary option for children in unsafe homes, it is intended to be a temporary solution, though this is often not the case for many in the system. Some children instead find themselves in foster care for a year or more. According to the National Foster Youth Institute, over 20,000 youth age out of the foster system every year before being placed in a permanent home. For many of these children, being left without a stable home for an extended period of time severely affects the quality of their education, as they struggle to keep up academically and connect with their peers.

Seattle resident David Vanwetter’s living situation as a teen was never entirely stable. He was often shuttled between his two divorced parents’ homes and the home of a family friend; and at just 13, Vanwetter began spending the majority of his time on the streets, where he began using methamphetamine and acquired a gun. Within a few short years, Vanwetter had already been in and out of the state’s juvenile justice system about a dozen times. Most of the times he was arrested, Vanwetter was homeless, which left him with no place to go once he was released. This entangled him in a cycle of detention and homelessness. “I’d get out of juvie and I’d already know, well, I’m going to be back to juvie soon,” said Vanwetter, who is now 21. “But what I didn’t know was how to not be homeless.”

Since its establishment in 1935, the United States’ Child Welfare Services system has worked to promote the wellbeing and safety of children. It is a complex system, which can vary quite a bit from state to state, but in general works to fulfill a few specific goals: to investigate reports of possible child abuse and neglect; to provide services to families that need help protecting or caring for their children; to arrange for children to live with family members or with a foster family when they are not safe at home; and to arrange for reunification, adoption, or other permanent family placements for children leaving foster care.

With such lofty goals, it comes as no surprise that many child welfare systems in the U.S. were falling short, much to the alarm of advocacy groups.

More than a decade ago, Utah resident Tanner Atwood-Bowen was a teenager the night he and two friends found a four-wheeler and took it for a spin around their neighborhood. Although the boys knew this was a mistake, officers soon arrested them. Atwood-Bowen later admitted to a felony theft charge in Utah's juvenile justice system and was required to pay the court about $5,000 in fees. A year later he was able to have the record expunged -- and yet the conviction has still managed to follow him into his adult life. In 2017 Atwood-Bowen was in the process of training as a probation officer, which requires the disclosure of felony convictions. As his juvenile record was expunged, Atwood-Bowen did not include it on his application per a court worker’s instructions. But a police standards board accused Atwood-Bowen of lying on his application, and ultimately barred him from working in law enforcement for two years. Since then he has gone on to open his own real estate business, but the police standard’s board decision, as a matter of public record, comes up in Google results when his name is searched, and Atwood-Bowen says this has hurt his ability to grow his business. Atwood-Bowen, who is now 29, believes that he could have avoided these professional issues related to his conviction if he had been allowed access to an attorney.

Many young people worry that their criminal past will follow them throughout their lives. As soon as a juvenile comes into contact with law enforcement, a criminal record is opened on them, and this record will contain every single document that is created by the police department, court, district attorney, and probation department in relation to the juvenile’s criminal activity. A common misconception about juvenile records is the belief that, once a youth turns 18, the record disappears; this, however, is often not the case, and a juvenile criminal record can create serious obstacles in adulthood. It can prevent a young person from receiving financial aid to assist with college tuition, harm their ability to get a job or join the military, and impede licensure eligibility for certain professions. It can also affect eligibility for public housing, not only for the adolescent but also for the family they are residing with. In recent years, some states have added laws to try and keep juvenile records from haunting adults, but not all states have such safeguards in place.

When Toney Jennings was arrested in 2010, he was a 16-year-old being raised by his grandmother in Caledonia, Mississippi. He loved playing football and going fishing. Despite having a diagnosed learning disability and an Individualized Educational Program (IEP), by the time he was in high school, Jennings was so far behind in school that he was labeled as illiterate. A series of behavioral issues led his teachers to recommend that Jennings’ grandmother send him to an alternative school. When he entered the school, Jennings read at a kindergartener’s level and his math skills were that of a first-grader. But he began making progress there, where teachers were able to give him the individual help his IEP entitled him to. Being arrested, however, stopped his progress in its tracks. That’s because, for the six months that Jennings was in a juvenile detention facility, he didn’t attend any classes at all. Instead, Jennings says that he watched television, played basketball, and “basically just stayed to myself.”